Exploring the changes in scientific thought over the last 100 years, Degler's 'In Search of Human Nature' provides a detailed perspective on the reasons behind the shifting emphasis in social thought from biology, to culture, and again to biology.
There was a time when humanity looked in the mirror and saw something precious, worth protecting and fighting for--indeed, worth liberating. But now, we are beset on all sides by propaganda promoting a radically different viewpoint. According to this idea, human beings are a can…
There was a time when humanity looked in the mirror and saw something precious, worth protecting and fighting for--indeed, worth liberating. But now, we are beset on all sides by propaganda promoting a radically different viewpoint. According to this idea, human beings are a can…
Examines the mass sterilization practices in Scandinavia, and the history, politics, science, and economics that led up to the eugenics programs.
Before it became established as an academic discipline, physical anthropology emerged as a contested notion of reference to the cosmological views associated with the Darwinian theory of evolution and its implementation by the natural sciences. However, its subsequent developmen…
This monograph discusses Portuguese eugenics within a strong international historiographical comparative framework and situates it within different regional, scientific and ideological types of eugenics in the same period. The author argues about three factors that curtailed the…
Twisted bodies, deformed faces, aberrant behavior, and abnormal desires characterized the hideous creatures of classic Hollywood horror, which thrilled audiences with their sheer grotesqueness. Most critics have interpreted such traits as symptoms of sexual repression, or as met…
Reading such films as Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), Freaks (1932), and Mad Love (1935) against early-twentieth-century disability discourse and propaganda on racial and biological purity, Smith showcases classic horror's dependence on the n…
Twisted bodies, deformed faces, aberrant behavior, and abnormal desires characterized the hideous creatures of classic Hollywood horror, which thrilled audiences with their sheer grotesqueness. Most critics have interpreted such traits as symptoms of sexual repression, or as met…
Overview: Scientific breakthroughs have led us to a point where soon we will be able to make specific choices about the genetic makeup of our offspring. In fact, this reality has arrived-and it is only a matter of time before the technology becomes widespread. Much like past arg…
Scientific breakthroughs have led us to a point where soon we will be able to make specific choices about the genetic makeup of our offspring. In fact, this reality has arrived--and it is only a matter of time before the technology becomes widespread. Much like past arguments ab…
French-colonial Tunisia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed shifting concepts of identity, including varying theories of ethnic essentialism, a drive toward "modernization," and imperialist interpretations of science and medicine. As French colonizers …